By Express News Service
BHOPAL: With the Centre asking states to ensure judicious use of oxygen, a model successfully adopted by the Government Medical College in MP’s Khandwa district could come in handy for the stressed hospitals across the country.
The medical college has put in place a mélange of best practices, spanning from correct identification and re-classification of patients as per oxygen requirement to segregating patients without oxygen need to separate floor and from monitoring the correct oxygen use based on actual need and forecasting the demand based on requirement to the training of human. Khandwa is among the few districts of MP which have till date managed to control new Covid-19 cases.
The hospital has monitored the correct oxygen use based on actual need and forecasting the demand based on admitted patient requirement. While patients needing no oxygen are admitted on the fifth floor and disconnected from direct pipeline, those admitted on the fourth floor are getting oxygen support between one and five litres per minute from oxygen Concentrators. On the third floor, Type B cylinders of one to 15 litre supply per minute is being ensured, while centralised oxygen supply is being ensured to reduce wastage on the second floor.
Khandwa collector Anay Dwivedi says the practices have resulted in reducing the usage of oxygen from 100 cylinders per hour to 30, thus helping saving 70 cylinders per hour and 1,800 cylinders in a day. “Tanker drivers told us that by lifting the tanker’s front wheel up to 1.5 ft, 300-350 kg more oxygen can be secured through the tank’s dead storage. We acted over it by lifting the tanker’s front wheel by nine inches and managed to get 75 kg extra oxygen from the tank’s dead storage,” Dwivedi said.
